The NES Classic is Important
If you were buying Christmas gifts for others this year you likely know what the hot ticket items were for many, Hatchimals and the NES Classic Edition. Since I don’t review toys here (I’ll save that for the YouTube channels my four year old subscribes to) I will talk about the NES Classic as my wife bought me one for Christmas and I’ve been enjoying my time with it.
I don’t intend on this being a review of the device nor do I wish to lament its scarce availability because you’ll find plenty of that online. Rather, I wanted to briefly talk about the importance of this device for the retro gaming community.
I’ve seen many people complain about the fact that you can’t use original cartridges, that you can’t download additional games, that the library is limited to thirty titles, that you are paying for ROMs when you can get a better experience on original hardware, that you can make a Raspberry Pi device that has more games available for cheaper, etc.
What many people who make these arguments forget to address in their concerns is the fact that you are already able to do all of those things with existing hardware or services. If you are a purist who only plays games using original hardware and cartridges, then you can buy an actual NES console. If you want to go to town and make a Raspberry Pi miniature computer loaded with a zip file of a thousand ROM files, you can do that as well. Nothing is stopping you from doing that and this device’s existence doesn’t take away those options you have.
What this devices does and has been doing, though, is providing everyday people who don’t collect classic gaming hardware with the chance to revisit a part of their childhood using an incredibly polished interface, a perfect controller and a curated selection of games that doesn’t bog you down. If you are someone who played these games 25 years ago and hasn’t kept up with them this entire time (like most in the retro gaming community have) then a list of a thousand ROMs is going to be incredibly overwhelming and you likely won’t care after a while. Rather, a focused and easy-to-grasp list of thirty titles is something anyone with some familiarity of those titles can follow.
Sometimes it is okay to have a simple, curated one off experience that you can return to when you’d like. This isn’t a full-fledged game platform and it shouldn’t be thought of as one. It is okay that a device doesn’t cater to every niche within the community because we already have options for those things. What this device does, and does incredibly well, is bring the classic games that we have spent our lives enjoying into a new light. Perhaps a hardened game player in their thirties picked one up and is now more likely to seek out the games of their youth. Maybe someone thinks this is the way to get their children or younger family members to check out some of their old favorites.
Regardless, this device has been a success and that should be seen as a positive within the community. Retro gaming is getting more buzz than it has in a while and we should enjoy it.
